Amusing outpourings, off colour rantings, ill conceived monologues and in-depth post mortems of things that are still alive

Friday, 18 December 2015

Poncey, Poncey, Poncey

(Quick note to my
Colonial fans… Not PONZI, that’s quite different, poncey is a UK slang word
that kind of just means pretentious)

At this time of year, those of us who find ourselves gainfully
employed may well be attending Works Christmas parties – Fun filled affairs
that can see the best of us laid low by alcohol-fueled bad decisions, ill-informed
liaisons and more blurred photocopies of freshly waxed genitals than you can
shake a staple remover at.

Many of us will attend formal meals at venues that we would
not normally consider eating at. Of
course, the hotels/restaurants see the whole shebang as a bit of an advert /
opportunity to show how inventive their chefs are… Mostly this involves
combining foods that don’t traditionally go together, like turkey and
chocolate, or cooking things in unusual ways like deep frying baby carrots,
then giving them a French sounding name that no-one really understands.

To this end, I decided to publish a quick ‘Poncey menu to
Real English’ translator to help you understand your menu choices (or if you’ve
already had your Christmas meal, what it was that you were complaining was
cold, without knowing that it was actually supposed to be, cold)

This post was suggested by my good friend Smoulder Wolf.

-oOo-

Ballotine – A bird sausage. Kind of… Well, more like a Kiev
I suppose when you think about it, but instead of garlic butter, it’s filled
with minced up bits of the same bird, mixed with its own rendered fat… Which is
why the give it a poncey name, because like brawn… When you know what it is, it
loses some of its magic (Did you know
that the Colonials call Brawn ‘Head Cheese’?)

Balsamic – Has had vinegar splashed on it… No, seriously,
that’s it. OK, the vinegar was (probably) made from cooked grapes and not
barley, like the stuff you put on your chips.
But you can buy Balsamic Vinegar in Lidl now, It’s not the Waitrose only
condiment that it once was.

Candied – Covered in bottled syrup, or stuck in a frying pan
with some refined sugar and heated until the sugar melts, because that’s
massively good for you.

Duxelles – Minced finely… in between chopped and pureed –
Used where you want to hide the use of cheap ingredients in plain sight, but
you also want them to be identifiable under low light conditions. “Ere,
Michelle, is that the Parfait of Gressingham Chipmunk or the Duxelles of
Hand-picked Sanddingham field mushrooms?”, “I don’t know, and neither can I
find my Playboy thong. Chablis, me old flower.”

Fricassee – Cut into chunks, fried, then served in some kind
of sauce, or a jus, if you’re a total knob-end. It’s the sort of thing you’d
make for yourself in a dirty frying pan with a tin of spam and a tin of plum
tomatoes after you get home from the pub.
You can tell the firemen, when they’ve finished damping down the remains
of your maisonette, “That were a porc fricassee avec la tomate jus what caused
that blaze, Trevor.”

Fondant – Now, you have to be careful with this one, it can
mean different things. If you’re talking
about a dessert, it means a type of thick paste, often chocolate, that’s
usually used as a base. If you mean
fondant potatoes, They’re right lush… imagine potatoes cut into cylinders, then
roasted whilst being repeatedly basted with stock until eating them tastes like
an angel has performed an unnatural sexual act on your tongue.

Infused – Boiled with.
If you want to make ‘Succulent potatoes, infused with jasmine’ then bang
some jasmine in the water you’re boiling them in – I mean don’t obviously, it’ll
make them taste like a rancid dachshund’s had a widdle in them, but that’s the
general idea – potatoes taste like potatoes, that’s a lot of their basic charm
in my opinion.

Jus – Pron: Djew… Juice… It’s what people who can’t make
gravy do instead of gravy to serve with meat.
See also: flavoured water, or piss.

Mousse – We all know what ‘Mousse’ is, right, I mean the
dessert, you can buy little plastic tubs of it almost anywhere chilled food is
sold. But, what’s a carrot mousse you
say? That’s easy, you just get some carrot flavoured baby-food, then pump SodaStream
gas through it until it doubles in size. It is purely a way of making food go
further. It’s an option that could
easily be used by the benefit receiving masses to make their weekly food ration
last longer. I see a bright future in ‘Big
Mac Mousse’ and suchlike.

Parfait – Weird one this, It’s a French word, that doesn’t
mean what it actually means in France.
In poncey UK restaurants, it means a ‘Paste’ as in meat paste, especially
designed for and by the hard of chewing. However in France, it’s kind of like
ice-cream, often with alcohol in it. So
pretentious that it’s actually gone around the whole ‘Fake French’ idea and come
in the wrong way. Which is just like a Frenchman if you think about it.

Shaved – Calm yourselves, it’s not what you’re thinking… It’s
a way of thinly slicing things using a vegetable peeler. It’s what happens when you give someone with
OCD a carrot to prepare. “It’s not quite perfect, I’ll take a bit more of this
side… Oh no, now it’s not symmetrical when viewed from this angle.” – And thus
were shaved vegetables invented.

Triple-Cooked – Stuck in the deep fat fryer three or more
times. Another cooking technique brought
to you by the Cardio-Thoracic Surgeons of the UK Benevolent Fund. Each ironic tiny galvanised bucket full comes
with its own set of defibrillator paddles.

Warm – An adjective that shouldn’t really need to be added
to hot food, but they feel it gives things a more ‘homely’ feel, usually
interchangeable with tepid and the slightly depressed customer exclamation of..
“Oh.” Most often applied to: Bread rolls & mince pies. Most often a complete lie.

-oOo-

Apart from all these wonders, you can ‘Poshen’ food up a treat by
using some other meaningless adjectives like ‘Farm-Fresh’ or ‘organic’ or ‘hand-picked’. And you can go a long way to improve the
general provenance by naming the geographical area where the food was grown,
reared, horrendously slaughtered, or the exact breed or variety (ten extra
house points for using the words ‘heritage’ or ‘vintage’ unironically.)

So there we go, an easy-peasy go-to guide for people who
want to decode their Christmas menus.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make myself a nice steaming plate of seasonal haricots bouillis dans la sauce tomate served on a bed of warm Derbyshire pain blanc.